The realities of the movie-making industry might just drive the show about movie-making off the rails.

Here is the official reason Project Greenlight exists: to give talented young unknowns a chance to break into the system. Just like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck!

Here is the actual reason Project Greenlight exists: to watch the dreams of woefully overmatched amateurs get whittled away, week by week, for the edification of you, the viewer.

After a decade-long break, Project Greenlight has made a triumphant return to HBO, where it's now three episodes into its fourth and (so far) best season. It retains the same format it had when it premiered in 2001: A gaggle of untested, unrepresented would-be auteurs submit materials online, with the winner getting the chance to make a feature-length film and have a documentary crew capture every humiliating rookie mistake. It's not technically a reboot, but the show isn't exactly touting its cinematic legacy, so let's do that here: Stolen Summer, a vanilla nostalgia piece by Season One winner Pete Jones; The Ballad of Shaker Heights, a coming-of-age dramedy notable more for the impish presence of a young Shia LaBeouf than for launching the careers of Season Two winners Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin; and Feast, a passable horror-comedy from by certifiable weirdo John Gulager, who took down the budget-conscious third season on Bravo. (Speakeasy, a low-budget indie from Brendan Murphy, considered the "arty" runner-up to Jones, is actually much worse than Stolen Summer.) But Damon and Affleck—and HBO, for that matter—are approaching this season with more sterling reputations than ever, and perhaps the added incentive to make great television without producing a movie that will embarrass them again.

And so with Season Four, we have a spectacular collision of forces: A show rigged to make it virtually impossible to produce a good movie and an insolent director who insists on trying. The terms and conditions remain as bad as ever, too. After the first season, the showrunners have thrown out the idea that the director can work from his own script—and the pronoun "his" applies, since all the winners have been men—and so now it's an awkward arranged marriage between a filmmaker desperate to get his foot in the door and a screenplay that may be some distance from his sensibility. This year, lucky auteur Jason Mann was bequeathed a truly awful-sounding rom-com called Not Another Pretty Woman, about a guy who gets left at the altar and winds up marrying a prostitute instead. And the show stipulates he has to do the rewrite with Pete Jones, whose affability has apparently earned him a legacy spot on the Project Greenlight roster. So with a dubious talent in Jones, a $3 million budget, and a total absence of confidence from everyone involved in the production, this complete novice has six weeks of preproduction to whip this turd into shape.

Yeah, good luck with that.

And yet Mann, a beakish film-school upstart, has been quixotically determined to act like an artist, rather than grateful contest-winner. When the powers-that-be this season—Damon and Affleck, HBO chief Len Amato, "mentor"/troublemaker Peter Farrelly and his brother Bobby, and producers Effie Brown and Mark Joubert, and Pearl Street Films' president Jennifer Todd—gather around to interview the finalists, Mann seems to be interviewing them for the privilege of hiring him to salvage their awful script. He won't make this dumb Farrelly-esque movie unless it can be overhauled to suit his more darkly comic sensibility. (Farrelly is not pleased, though he comes around on the kid, with disastrous consequences.) And the moment after Mann wins the job anyway, he buttonholes Matt and Ben backstage with two dictums: He wants to shoot on film instead of digital video and he wants to fire Pete Jones and replace him with another writer. Who does this guy think he is?

Mann's been a pain in the ass about the script, the look of the film, and the setting. But for even a half-decent director, these are all hills worth dying on.

With that, Project Greenlight has the essence of drama: Two opposing forces, asserting their will. A director with a stubborn and specific vision, a production without the time and resources to accommodate him. Through the third episode, Mann has pulled off the remarkable creative jujitsu of convincing Jones, then Brown and Joubert, and then HBO to dump Not Another Pretty Woman in favor of The Leisure Class, an expansion of a short he's previously directed. He seems to be losing the film-versus-video battle with Brown, who bristles at the added production costs. But he's currently digging in on the primary location, a mansion that's supposed to suggest old-money Connecticut but the possibles so far are looking more like nouveau-riche Los Angeles. So to recap, Mann has been a pain in the ass on three fronts: The script, the look of the film, and the setting. For even a half-decent director, these are all hills worth dying on.

But Project Greenlight is a reality show, and Mann has looked to some like the villain, a narrow-thinking and ungrateful stick-in-the-mud who's a big headache for people who have more experience making movies. Chief among them is Brown, a seasoned African-American producer (Dear White People, Rocket Science, and Real Women Have Curves are among her credits) whose showdown with Damon over diversity has rightly earned her hero status. Subsequent episodes have put Brown at loggerheads with Mann over the film-versus-video issue and the location, but it's not quite right to see them as adversaries (yet), which is what television encourages. It's in his interest as a director to make the best movie possible and it's in her interest as a producer to run the tightest ship possible. Those are not contrary goals by any means—they both surely want to make a good movie on time and on budget—the battle of wills is making for spectacular drama. (And high ratings. The third week was the most watched by a significant margin.)

There are plenty of variables that could cause the film to derail—and the show to change course—over the coming episodes. Key issues have not been resolved, new tensions have surfaced, and without a foot of film (or a second of video) in the can, it can't be guessed whether The Leisure Class will be an auspicious debut or total folly. But squint a little and Project Greenlight does offer a window into how the Hollywood system naturally seeks to devour its own—and how sometimes, creative people bite back.